lt children conclude to live
apart, unharassed and untortured by the conditions of propinquity.
Fewer children would enter into obviously fatal marriages if marriage
were not regarded as the only decent and respectable way out of the
home for a daughter. Who does not know of young people marrying in
order to escape from the home? I do not mean to imply that all young
people who desire to escape from the home are the victims of domestic
repression and parental tyranny, but I have often deemed it lamentable
that, for some young people as I have known them, marriage offered the
only excuse or pretext for taking oneself out of the home. Such
self-exile from home by the avenue of marriage often leads to tragedy
graver than any from which it was sought to take refuge. But a
democratic regime in the home must include the possibility of
honorable and peaceable withdrawal therefrom.

It should be said by way of parenthesis that marriage is not always a
secure refuge from the undemocratically ordered home. For parental
intervention in the life of married children is not unimaginable.
Under my observation there came some months ago the story of parents,
who quite forcibly withdrew the person of their daughter and her
infant child from her and her husband's home because the latter was
unwilling or unable to expend a grotesquely large sum for its
maintenance. This is merely an exaggerated example of the insistence
on the part of parents on the unlessened exercise of that power of
control over children, which is the very negation of democracy.

CHAPTER X

REVERENCE THY SON AND THY DAUGHTER

Reverence thy son and thy daughter lest thy days seem too long in the
land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. One of the elements making
for conflict between parent and child is the desire of parents who ask
for love, taking respect for granted, and the insistence of children,
taking love for granted, that parental respect be yielded them. There
are many causes that make mutual respect in any real sense difficult
between parent and child, parents asking love for themselves as
parents, children seeking respect for themselves as persons. After
dealing for two decades or nearly that with a child in the terms of
love, parents do not find it easy to treat a child with the reverence
that is offered to one deemed a complete, rational, unchildlike person.

An eminent theologian once declared that it was easy enough to love
one's neighbors b